I do guilt really well. Your comments are a reminder that not everyone who ‘abuses’ the system is in the wrong. One of the problems is that we do get students who have been assigned iNat as a project, and take the easy way out by not taking their own observations. It can get annoying! Just an FYI. But as folks have said, it’s a learning process. I’ve been on here for some time, and still can’t figure some things out! Welcome to iNat.
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I believe I did get warnings, I just didn’t know that until after my account was suspended, because I didn’t know where to look. From those people’s standpoints it probably looked like I just was ignoring the warning, unfortunately.
I know there’s some debate over if it is okay to use images you didn’t specifically take, but very rarely are any images that my kids take taken when I am not with them. As I start working more (COVID completely halted working for me, I’m just starting back up) there might be more of images that I wasn’t present for, but usually I am physically present for them so it’s not necessarily NOT a reflection of my own experience, which is something that’s emphasized in the guidelines. I do feel like it’s my choice to personally extend partial ownership to my children, which isn’t against any rule as far as I know, so I can choose to look it that way too.
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I guess I felt especially bad because copyright stuff is no joke, and I’ve dealt with it firsthand, even going to court over my own content being, what I would consider, stolen. Not images, and it had nothing to do with iNaturalist or anything similar, but I do have experience so as a grown man I feel like it’s a pretty dumb mistake to make, but here we are.
I do agree though, that more could’ve been presented on the app, to further clarify, which is why I think talking about the mistakes that do get made can be really helpful. I didn’t realize it was already such a glaring issue until I made this post.
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Technically I made my account in 2018, I think. And didn’t really understand it until about last year, so that goes to show how slow I was to figuring things out. Just glad I finally got the hang of it now, as it’s so much more enjoyable and interesting when you actually can contribute positively.
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My husband and I are a team. We work together. Any pic he takes gets uploaded into the account I manage. In my eyes, your situation is the same.
As a contrast, when my friend and I go nature rambling together, we might both see the same organism, but if I don’t get a photo of it, I don’t upload hers.
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My profile actually is actually for two people my husband and myself. I post pictures from both of us. If you wish simply make a note on your profile that you “iNat” as a family and some of the photos are taken by your kids.
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Some of my observations are from my wife as well. She’s very good with a professional grade camera, and I simply am not. There’s a lot of variation of quality throughout my observations because of that, but it’s all going to good use in my opinion, so if it’s blurry by my son or crystal clear from my wife, if it is distinguishable, it goes up. It’s nice to know other people are more lenient about the rule. I feel like it really is up to personal choice as to how much it reflects your own experience, so it shouldn’t be a huge deal if the picture wasn’t taken with your own hands, as long as it’s all amongst consenting friends or family.
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Wow! Thanks for the great thread and the really nice message you have put out here. Being a new user myself, I am only now discovering the depth to iNat. In fact the iNaturalist website is not something I routinely use even now, I figured out the forum and the website by chance. We got into this because my 8 year old is intensely passionate about nature and - more importantly - cataloging and learning names and behaviors. Hunting around we found the Seek app for her, and it is just so awesome - it has exploded her understanding of nature in a few short months. Seek app shows an option to post to iNaturalist, so we made an account and I then read up about iNaturalist and found the iNat app for my android phone.
Being a scientist, I was thrilled once I found other users and how it was such an awesome community science initiative - I have been using my iNaturalist app to teach my daughter how to document observations correctly, how to be an identifier with more rigor, how it can mess up community data otherwise. She uses Seek more to have her collection with herself to go through, find what’s local nearby and search for it.
Though I am just thrilled with discovering iNaturalist and its a big part of our world now - I hope to become a useful contributor to this community in time - I really don’t think I immediately found anything on how to use the Seek and the iNat (android) app and how to connect them to the website. If this helps you, I think I just blundered through and even now I am not sure I am doing it perfectly right at all, so as folks mentioned here don’t feel too guilty. Its a family exercise for us as well, with my husband using his DSLR camera for crystal clear shots and my daughter using the Seek app (some blurry shots but mostly Seek is very good with a genus level ID at least). And me putting everything together in the end into my iNat account to get the right pics and many angles for ensuring a good ID. Lot of work most nights and weekends but we are enjoying and learning so please continue and encourage your son, nature is just wonderful and learning about it even more so!
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Thanks for this. I was not aware of batch editing function, not being a user of the website dashboard. It takes painstakingly long to add observations from the iNat android app into projects I have joined. Its good learning as you revise each one while adding to a project, but as we have ramped up our rate of observations and IDs with time, this tip will be very useful. Thanks again.
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Group profies are actually discouraged and really why anyone would like to post something they didn’t see on their account? For me it’s cheating, I manage accounts for three people and know it’s not hard at all to not show thing I missed under my name. Plus what about when a child grows up and wants an own account? You could already have one for him or he’d need to copy observations/not use old ones at all, which is either really time consuming or unfair.
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Hey @anon83178471
Great thoughts and nice of you to share.
I wish we had more people who are, probably following the same trajectory, learn sooner :-)
As far as feeling guilt is concerned by guess is don’t be - we all make mistakes and if we learn from them then the guilt is useful and overcome :-)
Others have already said a fair bit about neurodiversity - if you son finds it is something he likes and is contributing that is so awesome.
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Regardless of any issues it seems to have helped you and your kids engage with nature, so its a win.
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I’d just like to add a book recommendation for your son: “Diary of a Young Naturalist” by Dara McAnulty, an autistic teenager. It’s an amazing book, and has won multiple awards.
He recently published a second book, “Wild Child,” for younger readers - haven’t read it yet.
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It looks like others already got to what I was going to say here including the neurodiveristy thread (a ton of us are autistic, i am also!) and that you don’t need to feel guilt or sadness and your family should feel welcome now. I think there needs to be a way to at least alert app users if there are messages or flags coming in, but i know the app development and such is wildly overwhelmed like everything else on iNat.
I should create an openly neurodivergent iNat users project or something. When I get a chance. Which may be never the way life is now.
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Your setup is scarily similar to mine, except my wife is a good photographer, not me. Thank you for this comment. It really has reiterated that the way I use it now is a beneficial way, which makes me feel MUCH better about the problems I had before. It really is great for kids if it’s done properly, and mine have the time and focus, surprisingly, to really do a lot with it.
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My wife and I are very weary about our kids using the internet because of personal reasons and outside concerns that have lead us to be very worried about their safety in the past. Those are relatively constant in nature, due to outside factors. Our comfort with them using the app and website stops when it is not managed by us and the easiest way to do that is through one account. I see why it is discouraged, but I would argue if I hadn’t explicitly said anything, nobody would know any different. Not to say I want to be a little snake and just slide on by, but I very easily could have done so. It seems like everybody else who mentioned similar concepts are also doing that same thing, and we only know that because they mentioned it.
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kids are allowed to use the app under supervision of parents, i don’t think you actually broke any rule with that. I don’t think that means you have to literally look over his shoulder every second, just be a participant. if he’s only using the app he can’t send messages anyway. Of course admin can correct me if i’m wrong. When he’s 13 you could spin off a new account for him if you want, but you wouldn’t have to. Lots of people have accounts with their family or partner. My 5 year old has already requested some observations be added…
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also here is the Road iNatting project. It did used to be called Ethaning but that name got changed for personal reasons i am not sure the user wants posted here or not. So now I guess it’s just road iNatting. Ive been adding road iNat observations forever, though they are not all in the project since it is newer.
https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/road-inatting
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I know that the observations not taken by yourself thing is definitely something people care about though, and I would say that’s the only thing I really don’t follow to the T. I probably do sound silly or like helicopter parents but we didn’t let my daughter have social media until she just recently turned 13. I know that my son could go anonymously if he used the app, which is what I would endorse for him, but we still are weary of it. I don’t really want to get too into depth with my personal family related things but there’s issues that could arise in regards to my account interacting with one that he made, which sounds really weird, I know, but it could be problematic for us. I would consider to be in a rather unique predicament but that’s even more cause for odder measures.
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Yes, I’m a big fan of this one! Haven’t gotten around to batch uploading to it but that’s something I intend to do. A lot of good data I imagine stems from this method of taking pictures/obtaining observations.